How does Google’s organic search algorithm work?

There are two main ways to make use of Google’s search engine for increased traffic to your site. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to paid advertising which shows up at the top of Google’s results in response to a searcher entering desired keywords. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is optimising pages on a website to be more relevant to and rank more highly in response to specific search terms. Both SEM and SEO rely heavily on a clear understanding of how Google’s organic search algorithm collects and organises data.

Search engines use a 3 step process designed to create an index that offers the user results as relevant to their search term as possible. If the search term ‘basketball courts near me’ is entered, then a page showing the 5 nearest basketball courts is much more relevant than a page on the origins of basketball courts – even though both pages may contain all the individual keywords making up the search. Search engines determine relevance by crawling, indexing and ranking all the publicly accessible pages online.

• Crawling is when a search engine probes content, recording code/content from each URL accessed.
• Indexing is the process of recording information gathered during crawling. This information is stored in an index. Once a URL is indexed it can show up as a result of the search engine.
• Ranking each piece of content by relevance to the search term, a search engine displays an ordered list from most relevant to least relevant results.

To rank more highly it is important to understand how step 3 works. There are a number of factors Google and other search engines consider when determining page relevance. Google tries to read pages as a real user would, so these are some things to consider:

• Is the URL optimised? A string of random letters and numbers is less readable than a clear, relevant URL structure (e.g. domain.com.au/blog/article-headline).
• Is the content of a page relevant to its title and URL? It is important that content is concordant with the search term leading to a page.
• Are pictures well labeled? Like site URLs, it is better to clearly describe any pictures (e.g. cat-sleeping.jpg is more readable than 13afahj.jpg).
• Does the website have a user-friendly internal hierarchy? How easy is it to find your way around the website? Is everything organised into logical categories with clear subcategories?
• Does the code of the site include relevant tags to help search engines understand the content of a web page?
• How trustworthy is the content? Google looks at how often and by whom a URL is shared. The most current iteration of Google’s search engine discounts spam sharing of links. If a link is shared a few times by extremely reputable pages which also have high relevance to the search term, it will rank more highly compared to an identical page with many irrelevant backlinks (hyperlinks which direct a user back to a website).